17-year-old Kurdish high school student killed by fascists in Turkey

Kahraman Kaya, a 17-year-old Kurdish boy who was attacked by a fascist group in Istanbul and was taken into intensive care since the incident, lost his life today.

Last Thursday, 10 Kurdish students went outside the school to come together and reach a compromise with the students that were sympathizers of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and who they had allegedly argued with earlier in the week. But they were attacked by a group of 25 people, some of whom were not students.

Kahraman Kaya, one of the students who was severely injured during the attack, was stabbed in the spleen, liver, kidney, and gall bladder and was put into intensive care at Umraniye Public Hospital after the operation he underwent.

The funeral of Kahraman Kaya will be held in the Karaçevre village of Diyarbakır after the autopsy is performed.

It has been reported that only one person out of the group who attacked Kaya and his friends has been arrested.

Kurdish children and youths have been subjected to the violence of fascist groups in Turkey on a daily basis for decades. Violence against Kurds committed with the help of police officers is common especially at schools and universities.

Giving just a few examples concerning the attacks that Kurdish students have been exposed to in recent months is sufficient to comprehend the threatening and shameful situation: On March 30, Kurdish students were attacked by the members of the fascist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) in their dormitories at Muğla University and no measures were taken to ensure security of the students by the university authorities.

On April 1, students at the School of Communication of Erciyes University in Kayseri were attacked by fascist groups again with stones and guns. No investigation was conducted regarding the incident.

2 Kurdish students were injured by the same fascist groups on March 24 in the city centre of Kayseri but nobody was taken into custody after the attacks.

Injuring or even killing Kurdish youths at university campuses and sometimes even in their dormitories simply goes unpunished, which proves how vulnerable Kurdish students are in the western cities in Turkey where they choose to go in order to study and acquire a profession.

There is a high Kurdish population in the western regions of Turkey as Turkish security forces destroyed as many as 3,000 villages and displaced hundreds of thousands of Kurds in the 90s. Many national and international human rights organizations reported that Kurds whose homes and villages got burned by Turkish security forces had to flee to the western cities of Turkey, where they experienced a high level of isolation, discrimination, and poverty. Moreover, Kurdish people who filed claims for their burned homes often disappeared.

Human Rights Watch documented many instances where the Turkish military forcibly evacuated villages, destroying houses and equipment to prevent the return of the inhabitants. An estimated 3,000 Kurdish villages in Turkey were virtually wiped from the map, representing the displacement of more than 378,000 people.

As a result of the assaults and persecution of the Turkish security forces, many Kurds had to abandon their indigenous regions where their ancestors lived for centuries.

And now, even years after Kurds have had to leave their burned homes and villages, they are still unwelcome in the Turkish western cities where they continually fall victim to the violence inflicted by both the security forces and members of the legal fascist party of Turkey.

Who is terrorist? Kurds who seek freedom and justice? Or the racist state of Turks discriminating; killing, torturing, and subjugating Kurds? However, this will be revealed to the Western people only when the US abandon its guarding dog; Turkey!